The Denier

in my defense I cut myself off for some time away from it all

Symbols

Desert, Racetrack Playa, Sailing Stone, Salamander, Crown,
Raven, Joshua Tree, Mountain, Stars Timelapse, Night, River Lethe

Keywords

Detachment: cutting the cord, letting go, shedding one's old life, attention deficit, playing it cool, hands off, not caring, insensitivity, dissociation, neglect, cold shoulder, apathy, cold blooded, emotionally unavailable, freeze response

Wounding: cancelling, abandonment, denial, rejection, disapproval, repression, canceling, throw away, avoidance, not my problem, self-denial, harmful

Mortality: quitting, sacrifice, discontinuity, ending, deadline, fragmentation, breaking the cycle, escape, reset

Examples

Movie Clips & Videos:

The story of The Tree of Life (the movie that inspired this card)

Detachment (the story of a world that stopped caring)

Film Philosophy – The Sacrifice

Skinny Jeans Boyfriends Dating Pattern – Your Sister's Sister,
Fire Me, Cocoon of Self-Banishment – Up In The Air
The Challenge of Being Close

The Tree of Life: Crafting an Existential Masterpiece,
The Theme of Eternal Recurrence in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice,
Mythology of Sacrifice, Refusal of The Suitors - Joseph Campbell

"The snake often means resurrection on account of the shedding of its skin. According to an African myth, there was no death on earth originally, death came by mistake. People could shed their skins every year and so they were always new, rejuvenated, until once an old woman, in a distracted condition and feeble-minded, put on and old skin again and then she died. That is the way in which death came into the world. It is again the idea that human beings were like snake originally, they did not die. The snake was always associated with death, but death out of which new life was born."

– C.G. Jung

TV Shows:
Russian Dolls (Netflix)

Songs:
Chanson Noire – L'Heptade (Harmonium),
Sisyphus (Andrew Bird)

Sisyphus – Andrew Bird (Breaks Down His Song, Sisyphus)

Podcasts:
5th Vital Sign (Invisibilia),
Life and Death of a Melody – Loops (Radiolab),
Serial Ghosters (This American Life),
Just Sex: Hookup Culture (Hidden Brain)

Writings:
Fables of the Salamander and the Seahorse,
Practicing the Subtle Art of Detachment, Attachment Theory,
When, Why, and How To Say No, Avoider Love Style,
Why Women Stay In Relationships With Unavailable Men,
How It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails,
The (R)evolution Of Steve Jobs, I'm Not Ok – You're Not Ok,
How To Deal With Bullying From Your Past,
May Sarton on How to Live with Tenderness in a Harsh World

French Leave, Francis I of France, Detachment (Philosophy), Avoidance,
Avoidance Response, Autotomy, Eternal Return, Learned Helplessness,
Mind-Body Problem, Enso, Emotional Abandonment & Detachment, Fire,
Cancel Culture, Sacrifice, Throw Away Society, Denial, Cycle of Abuse,
Counterdependency, Neglect, Apathy, Self-Denial, Anomie, Existential Crisis

"The crocodile, as well as the tortoise and any other cold-blooded animal, represents extremely archaic psychology of the cold-blooded thing in us. We have a trace of it in our anatomy, in the structure of the nervous system. That is the thing we never can understand – that somewhere we are terribly cold-blooded. There are people who, under certain circumstances, would be capable of things which they simply could not admit."

– C.G. Jung

"I nourish the good and extinguish the bad" – King Francis 1st

Literature:
The Fox and the Grapes (Aesop),
The Raven (Edgar Allen Poe)

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

Life Doesn't Frighten Me (Maya Angelou, Jean-Michel Basquiat)

"Dragons breathing flame
On my counterpane
That doesn't frighten me at all."

Art:
Tree of Life (Gustav Klimt)